CVE-2021-3490: Canonical Ubuntu Linux

High severity, CVSS 7.8. EPSS: 27.4% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

The eBPF ALU32 bounds tracking for bitwise ops (AND, OR and XOR) in the Linux kernel did not properly update 32-bit bounds, which could be turned into out of bounds reads and writes in the Linux kernel and therefore, arbitrary code execution. This issue was fixed via commit 049c4e13714e ("bpf: Fix alu32 const subreg bound tracking on bitwise operations") (v5.13-rc4) and backported to the stable kernels in v5.12.4, v5.11.21, and v5.10.37. The AND/OR issues were introduced by commit 3f50f132d840 ("bpf: Verifier, do explicit ALU32 bounds tracking") (5.7-rc1) and the XOR variant was introduced by 2921c90d4718 ("bpf:Fix a verifier failure with xor") ( 5.10-rc1).

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: version 20.04 only; version 20.10 only; version 21.04 only
• Linux Linux Kernel: from 5.10, before 5.10.37 (fixed in 5.10.37); from 5.11, before 5.11.21 (fixed in 5.11.21); from 5.12, before 5.12.4 (fixed in 5.12.4); version 5.13 only

Published 2021-06-04. Last modified 2026-06-17.